


Letters Unread

by Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, Cassian Andor-centric, Developing Friendships, Friendship, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Tea, friendship across social classes, spans from pre rogue one through rotj
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-31 03:00:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17841161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome/pseuds/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome
Summary: From the day they meet, as war-refugee and princess, Cassian and Leia's friendship is never a sure thing.Time and war change them both, in ways neither can predict.





	Letters Unread

**Author's Note:**

  * For [minnabird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/minnabird/gifts).



The first time Cassian deletes her letter, he’s eleven and furious. There are still bandages wrapped around his hands from when Mr--no--Major Draven brought him to a med bay after finding him alone in a bombed-out building on Fest. There’s still rage in his heart, not just for the stormtroopers he’d most recently fought but for the clone troopers who’d destroyed his family, for the Old Republic that had burned the factories on his planet, for everyone who has more than him.

And when one is a poor orphan from the Outer Rim, everyone, especially the only Princess of Alderaan, has more than you.

Which is why her little note makes him so mad. It’s so sweet, so simple, and so utterly humiliating. For a princess of a planet long loyal to first the Republic, then the Empire, to treat him like an equal, to call him a friend. Cassian deleted the note from the little datapad they’d given him on the ship, told him to practice reading his basic on it. He doesn’t know how the Princess was able to contact him, nor does he care to find out.

_Hi Cassian! I’m Leia. Do you want to be friends? I can make tea and cookies and we can have a real tea party!_

A party? The idea is ridiculous. He’s not a child, not in any way except perhaps height. He’s always been short for his age and is shorter now that he’s lied to Draven, telling him that he’s thirteen, in his clumsy Basic. Cassian had wanted to pick an age old enough these Rebels would let him keep fighting.

He has to keep fighting. Because if he isn’t a fighter, who is he?

The princess must have been the young girl he’d seen outside the med bay, a blur of white fabric and brown hair. He’d seen her watching, while the man he’d been told to call Bail and Draven discussed what to do with Cassian. He’d simply stood, waiting, shoulders straight, refusing to show any sign of weakness.

And when it was decided that Cassian could train with the fifteen-year-old recruits, he knew his hard work to keep his face calm, his posture strong, had been worth it.

* * *

 

The next time he deletes her letter, it is only a few weeks later. She’s sent another message, almost identical to the one before. He ignores it. He can’t attend tea parties. He’s a soldier now. But his parents always told him to be nice too. Cassian remembers that, even if all other memories of them, beyond his mother’s lullabies and his father’s laugher, have faded.

So he trots out of the room they gave him, looking for the princess. Her voice echoes from behind a closed door, just down the hall. Cassian tiptoes closer, listening.

“Papa, it’s not FAIR.”

“No, Leia. It’s not. But not everything in life is fair.”

“He’s a BOY. He’s little! Like me!”

Were they discussing… him? Cassian’s eyebrows lift. He keeps listening. Bail and the princess argue, and Cassian’s gut was right. It is about him. The princess keeps insisting he should live with them, stay in the palace with them, be her friend.

He can’t be anyone’s friend. He has to fight. He promised his own father he wouldn’t rest until the galaxy was a better place.

“Why am I too little to fight and he’s not?” the princess demands.

Cassian resists the urge to snort with laughter. She’s tiny. Barely older than…

Than the sister he can’t think of, because she is gone, and thinking of her will break his heart. Cassian decides he’s all done listening to that conversation, just as there’s a loud shatter. He freezes.

“Leia!” Bail shouts. “We do NOT throw teacups.”

“Oops.” She mutters, sounding not at all regretful. The scent of rich mint, mingled with a bright floral smell, seeps into the air. Cassian wonders what sort of tea that is.

He’d never even heard of tea until the Rebels found him. He’d grown up on mugs of warm milk, sometimes mixed with chocolate and spices. But those memories are of a past now gone for him. He knows better than to wonder if the Rebels know how to make hot chocolate. He knows better than to ask.

Cassian is not yet thirteen and has already learned that none of the things he might want; a home, friendship, a warm mug of hot chocolate, matter nearly as much as the things he must do for the Rebellion.

He’s not a princess nor is he anyone’s friend. He’s barely anyone at all. The Rebellion will become all that he allows himself to be.

* * *

 

Cassian doesn’t think of the princess again for years. Cassian is too busy learning to be a Rebel, and then, busy with his missions. They teach him languages, slicing skills, combat skills. They don’t let him teach his way of cooking food or making hot chocolate. There’s no time for that.

It’s all right, he tells himself. Fest is gone, and so is every bit of his past, every taste, every memory. Every battle he fights, every bit of data he acquires, is one small victory against all the pain of his past.

Until the day a stormtrooper clips him right in the leg. His team gets him out, safely, but he’s a liability while he heals. They need him for his speed, for his small stature. They have no need for a limping teenage spy.

As he pretends to sleep in his bunk, Cassian lists to the conversation outside. He’s always listening in, always eavesdropping. Because even on the base, even though they’re all fighting for the same goals, no one tells him much.

“I will take him with me,” the voice is deep and low and strangely familiar. Cassian sorts through his memory until a name appears. Bail. Bail Organa. The man he had met years ago, who had thought he was too young to fight. The senator and spouse to the Queen of Alderaan.

“He’s badly injured. The way his wound set… we don’t know if he’ll walk unaided again.”

A long pause. Or maybe, there’s no pause. Maybe it’s just Cassian’s ears ringing, because no one told him that before. He realizes he’ll have to take the bodyguard assignment, if they offer it to him, because he has no other options.Because they don’t think he can help the Rebellion now. He’s blown his only chance.

And having no options, for him, is like having no hope.

* * *

 

Cassian is assigned to be her bodyguard a few days later. The first thing he gets isn’t a blaster or even a uniform. Instead, he’s sent on a tour of the palace. It’s huge and ancient and one room contains enough rare marble and gemstone and guilding to have bought his entire village back on Fest.

But Fest is gone. Ruined, for at least three generations, according to the ecological studies. Thanks to the Republic Troopers who devastated factories, and then the Imperials, who finished the job. There’s no clean water, nor snow, left anywhere on his home. Everything has turned to ash and acid, all that was pristine forever marred by war.

And here, on Alderaan, there is enough fresh water to waste it in fountains and reflecting pools. He spends a week wandering through its halls, allegedly to learn the lay of the land, but mostly, he thinks, because no princess on such a perfect planet needs a guard.

When he meets her again, she’s older. (he is too, but he thinks he’s aged at least three decades, a lifetime almost, while she is only a few years older.)

To everyone else, they look nearly the same age. It’s a topic of palace gossip for a few minutes, given that their teenage princess now has has a teenage bodyguard. But once it is clear that neither of them seem likely to appear in the same room, let alone dance together, the palace gossip ceases.

Cassian doesn’t see himself as the brave young boy the others see. Instead, in his reflection, he sees a soldier who will never be good enough. A young man with a limp and shadows under his eyes, clinging to the smallest scrap of hope he has.

Then, finally, one day, he meets Leia again.

The princess is still stubborn. Still robed in white, still with her dark hair in those odd round braids over her ears. When he says that he’s going to be her guard, she retorts that she’s handling everything just fine herself.

“What am I supposed to do here?” he asks.

She shrugs. “Do you want some tea?”

He snorts in reply.

That makes the princess smile, as if he’d given her a gift.

Cassian’s eyebrows furrow. “What’s so funny?”

“No one snorts at me. I could offer people, oh, I dunno, dirty paint-water and call it tea, and they would curtsy and say _thank you princess.”_

“That’s stupid.”

“It really is.” The princess crosses the room to a little ceramic teapot on a heating station. There’s two small mugs next to it, both of which look homemade. Like the ones he used to drink hot chocolate out of. A lifetime ago. “I’m making myself tea. If you want any, you can pour some.”

“Tea is just hot leaf juice anyway.”

Leia giggles. “Maybe. But this has starblossom flowers in it! They’re my favorite.”

Cassian has never seen a starblossom flower, but he remembers the scent of mint and flowers from the thrown teacup, another lifetime ago. “I’ll try it,” he says. 

She pours him a cup, spilling a little on her long white sleeve. The dress is far too impractical, and the tea, he thinks, is terrible. But he can’t tell her that. Instead, he asks, “why did you want me to come to the palace? Years ago.”

“Because…” she sighs. “I thought it would be nice to have a friend.”

“You have everything.”

Leia shrugs. “Maybe. But it’s… it’s lonely here. Mama does lots of political work and well, we both know how busy my papa is. I’m just a distraction to him.”

“You’re his daughter.” he tries not to think of his family, now gone. “He wants to keep you safe.”

“But I want to help.”

And now all Cassian can hear is his own voice, from so long ago, saying that thing to his own father. Those five words had changed everything. Leia doesn't understand, Cassian realizes, what help looks like in a war. How helping sometimes isn't fixing things, but breaking them so they can be mended. Leia is young and naive and Cassian finds he wishes he was, too. But all he can say is, "I think hot chocolate tastes a lot better than tea."

"What's that? Tell me more."

  
For the first time in a lifetime, Cassian talks of Fest, of all that he has left behind.

 

* * *

Time passes. Cassian hates Alderaan, hates the seasons, the luxury, everything.  He tries to hate Leia, which is made harder by her being… who she is. Funny, smart, capable. Prone to sneaking away from her lessons and begging him for lessons in “spy stuff” instead. She tries to make him hot chocolate, which fails, and tries hard to make him his own mug for tea in her pottery class, which also fails. But she's stubborn and swears she'll get both right one day.

His limp heals slowly, and though he doesn’t notice, his heart heals too. His dreams have fewer shadows, his eyes are brighter with more hope. He remembers, here on Alderaan, what peace can feel like.

Most evenings, they drink tea together in one of the quiet courtyards of the palace. He tells her Festian poetry. She tells him the chaos she’s caused in her lessons. Neither of them talk about the war. It's not like home. Nothing’s like home. But it’s not bad.

He rather likes being a bodyguard. Promises to keep her safe. She, then, insists on making the same promise for him. Which is stupid, of course, but he won’t tell her that.

One day, though, the order comes, and Cassian is pulled away from his life on Alderaan and pushed back onto the front lines. The Rebellion needs him.

And he will always go where he’s needed.

* * *

 

The second time he deletes her letter is because he doesn’t have the clearance to answer it They’ve moved him into a different line of work. No longer is he training to slice into systems, to fool Imperial officers into trusting a messenger boy with their datachips. Instead, his days are spent focused through the sight of a sniper rifle.

Practicing.

He forgets those brief moments of sunlight in the courtyards of the palace. Forgets the feeling of a soft bed and a warm blanket. Forgets everything except the skills he has learned. The skills the Rebellion needs and the skills that will keep him alive.

The third time he deletes her letter, it is because he has innocent blood on his hands.

The forth, the fifth, the sixth, all go unanswered. He notices the letters, in the simplest of terms. Notices that they exist, that they flash on the top of his datapad, how she’s the only one who calls him _Cassian_ and not _Andor._ Notes how some are long and chatty. Others are terse. Still others have begrudging apologies for the terseness in the ones directly preceding them. It becomes a ritual, of sorts. The day he checks into a Rebel Base will be the same day a new message appears in his inbox.

Always from Leia.

Always offering a friendship that he has no idea how to reciprocate.

So he stays busy with work.

There’s no trace of his earlier limp these days. He’s strong and fast and almost always silent. The other operatives, Melshi, Rodma, offer small overtures of friendship too, but he’s not sure what to do with any of them.

Cassian has spent far longer as a soldier than as anyone’s friend.

But then, one day, it is not a letter she sends him, but a droid, boxed up into parts and with a packing slip that states the droid is only to go to Cassian Andor.

It’s a KX unit.

Not yet reprogrammed, nor even all in one piece.

He gets to work. As he works, he talks to the droid, to Kaytu, as he soon calls him. They bicker and debate both logic programming and moral codes. They discuss current events and historical ones. Odds and ratios.

Slowly, Cassian learns how to be a friend.

Meanwhile, Leia becomes a leader.

 

* * *

For the first time, a year, then two, then three, passes with no letters sent by the Princess. Instead, he hears of her, of her achievements and work in the Senate. Soon, he sees her name on formal messages sent from the Alliance High Command.

He starts including her in his mission debriefing documents. Wondering if those count as replies to letters, in their own small, sad ways. As if his response to her tea party request all those years ago was to reply back, years later, _target was neutralized without breaking cover._

They’re never in the same room at the same time. After all, he’s just a spy, just a soldier, and she is still a princess. And though sometimes he catches the faintest lingering aroma of her starblossom tea, enough to remember when they used to sit side by side, when they’d pretended they were peers, equals, two young people making grand plans to save the galaxy together.

But they were never be friends. Not then, not now.

The next message he sends to Alliance High command is his acceptance of his role in Operation Fracture. He’s sent to Kafrene within the week.

If he had checked his room one last time, he would have seen a handmade mug, the result of a Princess’s last pottery class before the teacher had given up on her, waiting for him with a note.

The note, a letter simpler than any she had sent in a long time, simply read, _May the Force be with you._

The seventh, eght, ninth, and so on, those are all sent to a man on the brink of death. He lives, though. He’s survived Scarif, survived a rescue mission that had saved his whole team, even after the plans had been transmitted.

When he is coherent, for the few moments between the sharp pain of broken ribs and the numbness of bacta, he learns that Leia received the plans. He thinks, ruefully, maybe that was the reply to all those offers of warmth and cheer from her.

_I’m sorry I can’t be your friend but here are some plans for the weakness inside the superweapon._

That’s before they tell him that she was captured, that Alderaan is no more.

* * *

 

In his dreams, now, he doesn’t see the destruction of Jedha. Instead, he dreams of the Death Star’s sickly green light cutting through the courtyard, blasting through all the stained glass, all the marble, the decadence he had once scoffed at.

The beauty that had been destroyed.

Cassian’s healing falters after that. He spends days asleep, drifts through rounds of painkillers and therapy work for his back. His will has faded, knowing that he’s failed. He had been her bodyguard once, long ago, and had failed to protect her now, when she’d needed it.

Some nights, he dreams that someone sits by his bedside, sipping starblossom-mint tea. In his dreams, she talks softly to him and he answers. They bond over Imperial interrogation techniques, over the Death Star, over the inability to feel anything at all these days. In his dreams, he thinks, he is forgiven. He thinks that maybe, just maybe, he might know how to be a friend now. Thanks to Jyn, to Bodhi, and the others. He knows how to trust another person again, he tells her.

Or he would tell her, if she wasn’t a dream.

Cassian sleeps deeply by the end of each night, so he never sees the disposable cup, empty except for a few wet leaves and starblossom petals, that rests on his bedside table each morning until a helpful cleaning droid sweeps it into the trash.

 

* * *

 

It’s Jyn who tells him that Leia’s still alive, that the Rebellion is not only surviving but has more hope now, now that they’ve destroyed the Death Star, that there’s a young man named Luke Skywalker who might just be a Jedi, (though Jyn scoffs at that bit), and fills him in on the rest of the news.

This time, when a letter from her appears on his datapad, he reads it.

_Cassian,_

_You will, of course, be receiving official correspondence, paperwork, a medal of honor (which I know you’ll hate) and all other items as necessary. For now, focus on healing. I’ll keep a cup of tea warm for you at Echo Base. We all look forward to your return._

_Your friend,_

_Leia_

It’s enough for him to have hope again. At least, until the painkillers wear off and he has to think through all that he’s done, and all that he’s failed to do. He has plenty of time for thinking during his therapy, re-learning how to walk, how to hold things, how to function, with his new cybernetic implant in his back, healing the damage from the steel beam.

Cassian tries to draft a letter back. The therapy droid recommends it. Though his hands are clumsy and his thoughts slower than they used to be, he tries.

He deletes every attempt.

_I’m sorry,_ he wants to say. _I’m sorry we didn’t get the plans sooner._

_I’m sorry you lost your planet_

_I’m sorry we have all lost things._

Nothing he can write will replace all that has been lost.

* * *

 

Time passes. He heals. Breaks. Heals. He never makes it to Echo Base, but he plays a vital role in the lead-up to the Battle of Endor and in the skirmishes afterward Things aren’t easy, after all, it’s still a war, but things are better. He knows, not only how to be a friend, but how to allow others to be his friend too. Cassian, for the first time in a lifetime, trusts others again. Lets them closer. Tells Jyn and Bodhi memories of his past, lets Chirrut and Baze fuss over him. Cracks jokes with Kay. Friendship, he finds, is less of a burden and more of a blessing.

Slowly, peace spreads throughout the galaxy and Rogue One spreads out as well. Each of them going where they are most needed or most called to. Cassian wanders. Spends time with Jyn, with Bodhi, with others. For a time, he and Kay live with the Damerons, enjoying a small slice of hard-won peace after the war.

One chilly winter evening, after a long day of farming and repair work, Kes sets out steaming mugs for all of them. The mugs are all hand-made, each one unique and yet, achingly familiar. Inside, though, isn’t mint tea (though Cassian is sure that Poe would also call that beverage leaf-juice.) Instead, it’s the hot chocolate that Cassian had longed for, so long ago. Spicy-sweet, frothy, rich with memories as much as warmth.

Cassian takes a sip and then another.

“Everything all right?” Shara asks. “You’re even more quiet than usual.”

“Just thinking,” he manages. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had this.”

His friend nods and no one objects when Cassian takes his mug outside. He sits there, staring up at the sky once threatened by the Death Star. Re-living the whole war in one long, long exhale. Seeing every choice, every lie, every truth, laid out before him. A simple drink, shared between friends, was enough for him to feel at home.

Though Fest is long gone for him, its memory lives on.

He boots up his datapad. For once, he knows what to write to her. He’s kept himself aware of her activities, her progress in the Senate, her fight for a lasting peace. All the topics reported by any good HoloNews network. But Cassian has also kept connected to his spy network and they're the ones who let him know the things that the news keeps hidden.

The dangers still out there, tucked away in shadowy corners of the galaxy. The rumblings of dissidents, of Imperial sympathizers. The assassination attempts on Leia’s life.

Cassian taps out a message.

_Leia. Let me come to the Senate. I will gladly serve as your bodyguard, now, after the end of the war and the start of this new peace._

Her reply is to simply retype an old, old message

_Be my friend?_

* * *

 

Cassian and Kay arrive at the Senatorial grounds the next day. They complete the clearance forms, made far easier by the fame that makes him so uncomfortable. No one asks questions of a man with the reputation of a hero, even if that word means he'd also once done terrible things for the greater good.

This time, he notices none of the luxury around him. He’s learned that war will come to the rich and the poor, that marble pillars and stained glass can’t keep one safe from the worst of the galaxy.

He knows that Alderaan had all of this luxury and was destroyed. He knows, as he didn’t then, that a Princess could have everything and still be lonely. Finally, he reaches the hallway he’d been directed to. He doesn’t limp, not anymore, but he does move slowly toward his destination.

He knocks on her door.

She looks up. Her hair is braided differently now, shot through with a few strands of silver, but she still wears white. For Alderaan. For hope. For all the things that make her who she is.

“I’ve brought some tea,” he says. Because he can’t bring her planet back to her, just as her father could never return him to his. But he can offer her this small thing, the way she had once given him back Fest’s music. “Would you like a cup?”

Leia smiles. For the first time in what feels like a lifetime to them both, it is the same bright grin she had the day she’d met the young boy with wide eyes and the weight of the world of in his shoulder. "And I have real chocolate and spices, for hot chocolate."

"Trade?" he asks, shaking the tea bag. It had been difficult to find, now that Starblossom flowers are endangered, grown only in greenhouses on other planets. Difficult, but not impossible. Just like so many other things.

She nods. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

For the first time in many, many lifetimes, the boy from Fest and the girl from Alderaan sit and talk, not as strangers nor as comrades, but as friends.

**Author's Note:**

> Minnabird, I hope you enjoy! (and I'm so sorry this treat is late--they're two of my all time favorites and I wanted to do them justice.)  
> Huge thanks to SasssySnowperson for the beta.  
> Comments welcome!


End file.
